In 1997 the NHS spent over £700 million on agency nurses. This year the figure will have risen to over £2.5 billion. Why pay outrageous amounts of money to agencies when it is clearly cheaper to employ permanent staff? I will show that in actual fact it is not cheaper to employ permanent staff, and that increasing agency use is just more laying of ground work in preparation for the privatisation of the NHS.

The May 1978 issue of Black Flag started by calling for the abolition of the TUC, asking "why feed a watchdog that bites only its owner?" It covered the murder of a young anarchist in a Madrid cell, Augustin Rueda Sierra, and carried an extensive piece by black political prisoner Herman Bell, then incarcerated in Illinois, IS. This issue is noteable for its heavy concentration on international affairs in China, Spain, France and Greece.

Cinema workers have been some of the leading lights of the class struggle in London. A primarily young workforce, they've been active in forming unions and going on strike. How are we, as radicals, to relate to this new wave of struggle that encompasses both self-organisation and trade unionism?

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